The Father
Hadley loved her father immensely. James Richardson was “an executive at the family drug company.” He’d go off in the mornings “in his bowler hat and black string tie smelling of shaving cream and coffee and, just underneath, a ghost of whiskey.” He kept a flask in his dressing gown. They all knew another lay “tucked in his desk drawer in the study,” which he locked with “a tiny silver key.” Still another waited “behind slacked jars of stewed fruit.” He tried “not to be home very often, and when he was, he was quiet and distracted.” This imagery evokes sadness. Hadley is still coping with this loss.
Grieving
Hadley was so deeply unhappy that she didn’t want to live anymore. She was young but emotionally exhausted, depressed, and destroyed. One afternoon shortly after her mother’s funeral, there was “a terrible storm in Ipswich Bay,” and Hadley talked one of the boys from “a neighboring cottage” into taking her out in it, “in a bowboat.” “Waves slashed at the bow” and “came stinging over the sides” and into their faces. She couldn’t even swim, but he “didn’t turn back.” The clouds were “low and terrible” and the air was “drenched and salty.” Hadley felt as if she was “drowning the whole time, over and over again.” This imagery evokes a feeling of despair.
The Apartment
Ernest and Hadley moved to Paris and started settling at their new flat. He loved the place “at first sight” whilst Hadley was “homesick and disappointed.” The apartment came “furnished, with an ugly oak dining set and an enormous false-mahogany bed with gilt trimmings.” The mattress was good, “as it would be in France, where apparently everyone did everything in bed – eat, work, sleep, make lots of love.” Right away the pair began to rearrange the furniture. Once they had that done, Ernest “sat down at the table to write a letter to his family,” while his wife unpacked their “wedding china and the few nice things” they had brought along. Hadley had “such a pang for home” that she began to cry. This imagery evokes a feeling of homesickness and disappointment.
